When Nvidia launched the RTX 30 family of GPUs late last year, the best gaming PCs received a huge shot in the arm, with even the upcoming 3060 Ti reportedly beating the previous heavyweight 2080 Ti on a slew of benchmarks.
But those that enjoy their PC gaming on the go have yet to receive the upgrade on the best gaming laptops. For now, Nvidia’s most powerful mobile GPU around remains the 2080 Super. And while that chipset is certainly no slouch, allowing ray tracing and impressive VR performance on the go, it’s clearly no match for the next generation of Ampere GPUs.
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Thankfully, it looks like the mobile cousins of the RTX 30 family may be on the way, and with us very soon. Twitter user @momomo_us found a now deleted listing on Dutch PC maker Skikk’s website. Before it was pulled, the page showed a number of gaming laptops compete with an Nvidia RTX 3060 with 6GB GDDR6 memory, a RTX 3070 Max-Q with 8GB of GDDR6 and a RTX 3080 Max-Q with a whopping 16GB of GDDR6 RAM.
To be clear, just because the product has the same name doesn’t mean you should expect the same level of performance as the desktop equivalents. Not only do these mobile chips apparently use GDDR6 memory, rather than the GDDR6X found in their bulkier siblings, but the portable nature of laptops mean that GPUs have to be paired back for cooling and battery related reasons. That might be why the mobile RTX 3080 seemingly gets an extra 6GB RAM over its desktop version, to compensate for performance losses elsewhere.
Still, Nvidia achieved some pretty impressive performance from the mobile RTX 20 chips, bringing the delights of ray tracing to the small, portable screen, so we’re excited to see what the company can do with the next generation of laptop GPUs.
We likely don’t have too long to wait for all of this to be made official. CES 2021 kicks off January 11, and Nvidia has already booked an event for the 11th entitled “GeForce RTX: Game On.” While this could just be making the 3060 and 3080 Ti official, we’d be surprised if there wasn’t a mention of the RTX 30 family coming to laptops as well, given the company has previously used CES shows to unveil new mobile GPUs.
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